Objective  To introduce the Self-Rated Fall Risk Questionnaire (FRQ) from U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and to evaluate the reliability and validity of the FRQ among Chinese community elderly for developing fall risk self-assessment instrument for elderly populations in China.

  Methods  The Chinese version of FRQ (FRQ-CV) was developed through the process of translation, back-translation and cultural adaption. A total of 203 residents aged more than 65 years were recruited in three communities of Luohu district of Shenzhen city and administered with the FRQ-CV to evaluate the reliability, validity as well as the predictive power of the scale from December 2017 to February 2018.

  Results  Both of the overall Cronbach′s α coefficient and split-half reliability of the FRQ-CV were 0.670. No significant decreases were observed in consistency Cronbach′s α coefficients after removal of one of the 12 items each time. The convergent validity was 100%. Satisfactory content validity and discriminant validity were observed. The exploratory factor analysis demonstrated that there were 9 factors in the scale which could explain 88.26% of the total variance. It was highly consistent with the presupposed scale structure. The sensitivity reached 81.03% and the specificity was 51.72% when the cut off total score was equal or greater than 4. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was 0.743. The positive predictive value and the negative predictive value were 40.17% and 87.21%, respectively. The Youden index was 0.33.

  Conclusion  The FRQ-CV is of good reliability, validity, and high sensitivity in identifying fall risk among community elderly and the scale could be used for fall risk self-assessment in community elderly populations.